Drink - Victoria Moore on a tipple that's not just for Christmas

It's unusual for me to use this space for making purchasing recommendations, but this week I was buying a truckload of wine when, by the till, I saw a bargain that made me laugh aloud in delight and incredulity - half-bottles of Sandeman's 1997 Vau Vintage port for just £4.99.

Port has long been in need of a make-over. It is no longer popular in the British bulldog "Samuel Johnson put away four pints before breakfast" way it once was. In 1994, the industry had a nasty shock when the government's Hospitality Fund Advisory Committee took the decision to stop including any supplies of port in the bottles of wine (up to 5,000) it bought to lay down each year. "No one drinks port after government functions any more," explained the fund's secretary at the time. And by the late Nineties, even the Americans were buying more top-notch port than us.

Part of the problem is that port suffers from what I think of as Christmas-cake syndrome. It is very difficult to find the right time to drink it. It's actually far too rich for the end of a meal - as digestifs, brandy and calvados are much more effective. Also, most people taste it only when they are far, far too full to appreciate it. Usually, they are also far, far too drunk, so they then blame it for the next morning's hangover.

And there is more. As the chef Heston Blumenthal once pointed out to me, our senses of taste and smell have sharply evocative powers, and when we taste a seasonal flavour we build a whole environment around it. In the case of port, usually drunk after a bad-tempered Christmas dinner, this is a disaster.

But I first tasted Vau Vintage at the end of a baking hot September day in Oporto. In an upstairs room in the Sandeman lodge - I was, it must be noted, enjoying very generous hospitality from the port-makers - in Vila Nova de Gaia, I had been fed a delicious but not too heavy dinner of partridge pie. The small windows were open over the River Douro, and the silken folds of twilight had just given to the black of night-time proper. Sandeman were very proud of their Vau Vintage, and they marketed it cleverly. It was, they said, a "new" style of port specially blended to appeal to modern palates - softly fruity and youthfully vibrant. It was also intended to be drunk young rather than aged for years in a gloomy cellar.

I had recently been encouraged to develop my own personal system of labels, however ridiculous, to help me remember the flavours of wines that I tasted. "Whatever first comes into your head," the wicked genie had told me, "just call it that. You'll find it much easier to re-identify flavours that way." And so, with no small degree of pretension, I decided that Vau Vintage reminded me of a newly bathed baby sinking the folds of its peach-down skin into warm towels. We drank it with an unctuous chocolate pudding, and a slight, warm breeze lifted and turned the air around us.

No wonder I liked it. But Vau Vintage has passed tests more objective than that. And if my heady memories can supplant your own turgid Christmas ones and encourage you to enjoy port anew, then I shall be delighted.

Oddbins, the wine merchant running the incredible £4.99 offer (this port usually sells for more than double the price), has a limited availability at this price and, it says, "it's flying off the shelves". What's more, it is being sold in half-bottles, making it an even better bet. Once it has been opened, port really doesn't keep a great deal longer than a table wine. Dusting down the same bottle every Christmas is about as good an idea as leaving the milk out of the fridge at the height of summer. With the half-bottle size, at least there's a fighting chance you will finish it in one sitting. I bought three at once. The man who sold it to me confided that he had gone for a case.

If Oddbins has sold out by the time you get there, then please, seek advice and buy another kind of port, and find a new time of day to drink it. I've always found 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning works very well . . . but that may just be me.

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